Start now on that farthest western way,
which does not pause at the Mississippi
or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a
worn-out China or Japan, but leads on
direct a tangent to this sphere, summer
and winter, day and night, sun down,
moon down. and at last earth down too.

--HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden ( 1854)

CHAPTER I

A Highway to the Pacific:
Thomas Jefferson and the Far West

Although Jefferson, as we have seen, believed that all North
America would eventually be peopled by descendants of the
original English colonists, this prospect belonged to a remote
and rather dim future. His immediate attitude toward the Far West
was in some respects like that of the British authorities toward
the Ohio Valley before the Revolution: he thought of it as a area
to be occupied by fur traders rather than farmers. He does not
seem to have felt that his devout agrarianism was applicable to
the area beyond the Mississippi. A certain instinct for order,
and perhaps also the attacks of his Federalist opponents, led him
to suggest at the time of the Louisiana Purchase that the right
bank of tile river should be turned into an Indian reservation
for at least fifty years. Emigrants should be forbidden to cross
the river "until we shall have filled up all the vacant country on
this side." 1

Nevertheless, Jefferson was clearly the intellectual father
of the American advance to the Pacific. Early in his career he
began collecting materials relating to the vast hinterland which
he believed to be included within the original grant to the
colony of Virginia. During his five years of diplomatic service
in Paris, from 1784 to 1789, as he wrote later, he formed 'a
pretty full collection of the English, French and Spanish
authors, on the subject of Louisiana.'2 Not content
with buying books and compiling notes, he began a long series of
efforts to bring about actual exploration of the
trans-Mississippi area. In Paris he

16 HIGHWAY TO THE PACIFIC

worked out a plan whereby the
Connecticut traveler John Ledyard was to go eastward through
Siberia to the Pacific Northwest and thence overland across North
America to Virginia, but the venture was frustrated by the
Empress Catherine. Back in America as Secretary of State in
Washington's cabinet, Jefferson arranged for the French scientist
Andre Michaux to explore the Pacific Northwest under the
auspices of the American Philosophical Society. This plan
likewise failed when Michaux became involved in the filibustering
intrigues of the French ambassador Genet.3

After Jefferson's inauguration as President in 1801 he was
at last in a position to carry out the projected exploration of
the Far West by sending Meriwether Lewis and William Clark up the
Missouri and over the Rocky Mountains to the mouth of the
Columbia. The ostensible purpose of the expedition was the one
mentioned by Jefferson when he sought permission from Madrid for
Lewis and Clark to enter Spanish territory: it was a scientific
enterprise. But a responsible statesman was not likely to forget
that geographical knowledge was a necessary preliminary to
economic penetration and eventual political domination.
Scientific knowledge was to be sought for the sake of the fur
trade. The North West Company of Montreal was expanding westward
across Canada; Alexander Mackenzie had reached the Pacific in
1793. British fur traders were already established far down into
present Minnesota and the Dakotas. Indeed, as Lewis and Clark
found when they wintered from 1804 to 1805 at the Mandan Villages
near present Bismarck, North Dakota, the British were in
undisturbed control of the fur trade of the upper Missouri.

American trappers had to be encouraged to move into this
area as an offset to the British, whose strong economic position
might easily lead to the extension of their sovereignty over most
of the trans-Mississippi.4 The best means of
inducing American fur companies to enter the area was to make it
profitable for them, and this in turn meant finding a better
trade route than the British could command. Jefferson pointed out
to Congress that the Canadian route along the line of lakes and
rivers from Montreal to the Rocky Mountains "could bear no
competition

17 HIGHWAY TO THE PACIFIC

with that of the Missouri," which was shorter,
offered a continuous water route without portages, and might
possibly lead to the Pacific with only a short land carriage over
the mountains.5

The concrete plans outlined in this famous message to Con-
gress proved unworkable when brought to the test of practice. The
prospect of an advance up the Missouri to the area where American
fur traders might come to grips with the British faded when the
hostility of the Blackfoot Indians effectively closed the
waterway. And the effort to find a commercial route over the
Continental Divide and down the Columbia to the Pacific failed
because of difficulties of terrain. Even Meriwether Lewis
was forced to admit that 340 miles of land carriage, 140 miles
of it "over tremendious [sic ] mountains which for 60
miles are covered with eternal snows," would be necessary along
the most practicable communication across the continent by way of
the Missouri and the Columbia.6

But these practical difficulties were of minor consequence
beside Jefferson's continental breadth of vision. The importance
of the Lewis and Clark expedition lay on the level of
imagination: it was drama, it was the enactment of a myth that
embodied the future. It gave tangible substance to what had been
merely an idea, and established the image of a highway across the
continent so firmly in the minds of Americans that repeated
failures could not shake it. John Jacob Astor's ambitious plan of
establishing trade between the Columbia Valley and the Orient
from a base at Astoria was upset by the British navy, which
captured the fort during the War of 1812 and supervised a
virtually forced sale of the property to the North West Company.
But the American fur traders were determined to penetrate the
northern Rockies and in the 1820's William Ashley and Jedediah
Smith developed an overland route through the Platte Valley and
over South Pass.7 For the next two decades British
and American trappers struggled for economic domination of the
Northwest. In this context the Americans were worsted once again.
After all, they were fighting the greatest mercantile empire in
the world. In the Hudson's Bay Company, which had absorbed the
North West Company in 1821, they had an adversary enjoying the
advantage of vigorous governmental support as well as the
practical experi-

18 HIGHWAY TO THE PACIFIC

ence of more than two centuries of British chartered
trading companies. As long as the contest for Oregon remained in
the stage of imperial rivalry based on the fur trade, the British
proved impregnable.

On the other hand, the discovery of the overland route that
became the Oregon Trail had an ultimate consequence of far
greater moment than the fur trade. In the late 1830's and early
1840's widespread economic distress in the Mississippi Valley led
Westerners to look longingly at the free land and the supposedly
better markets of Oregon. When the frontier farmer learned that
he could take his family all the way to the Pacific with no more
equipment than his rifle, his wagon, and his livestock, his new
energies were thrown into the contest against Britain in the
Northwest.8 Within five years after the first
significant migration of American settlers to the Willamette
Valley the mercantilist colossus of the Hudson's Bay Company
gave up and quit. The Treaty of 1846, establishing the boundary
where it now is, at the forty-ninth parallel, merely records
officially the fact that the American agricultural frontier had
been pushed out to Oregon.